There is so much to do with Google Analytics if you look beyond the vain metrics. I define vain metrics as landing pages and unique visitors. They are very important yes, but they tend to be the metrics that gives the least insights. They are not really actionable metrics since they do not really let someone know what exactly is wrong. With the following features, marketers will be able to create data that actually lets one understand how to identify what is increasing or decreasing conversions, visitors, etc. These are my notes:
What You Can Do with the New Advanced Segments
• View all of your Google Analytics standard and custom reports for users and visits that match specific criteria.
• Create custom segments with the new easy-to-use interface that will guide you through five types of custom segments – Demographics, Technology, Behavior, Date of First Visit, and Traffic Sources.
• Include demographic data (age, gender, and interests) in your data segmentation.
• Import custom segments made by the Google Analytics team and other Google Analytics users.
• Share your custom segments with others using a custom link.
How to Use Advanced Segments a basic overview of what are the steps to create advanced segments.
How to Create a Custom Segment
Basically lets us know how we can create custom segments to be able to look for the data we want. The following are the categories into which we can break up custom segments
• Demographics – Segment your users by demographic information such as age, gender, language, affinity category, and location. In order to use the age, gender, and categories, you will need to go to the Audience > Demographics > Overview to see if you need to update your Google Analytics code to support the new Google Analytics data options. Even if you aren’t planning to use Advanced Segments, you’ll want to get this done right away.
• Technology – Segment your users’ visits by their operating system, browser, screen resolution, device, and mobile.
• Behavior – Segment your users by how often they visit and conduct transactions (number of visits, days since last visit, and visit duration).
• Date of First Visit – Segment your users by when they first visited.
• Traffic Sources – Segment your users by how they found you using campaign, medium, source, and keyword fields (such as the ones you would add as UTM parameter tags on your URLs).
Custom segment applications:
• Create custom segments for traffic from social media networks, search engines, and other channels of traffic to see which drive the best traffic.
• Create custom segments for different age groups to see which pages they visit most and how long they stay on your website.
• Create custom segments for specific keywords you are targeting on AdWords.
• Create custom segments for different campaigns you are tracking with UTM parameters.